First formed in Q1 of 2006, CSPromod was conceived as an attempt to bring a fully-customizable version of Counter-Strike to the Source Engine for the purposes of growing competitive play and broadcast spectatorship. With no disrespect to Valve Software or Turtle Rock Studios, the project arose from the opinion of many in the professional community: namely that Counter-Strike: Source was lacking in many key areas, and could be vastly improved upon. Much of the Counter-Strike community had been expecting CS:Source to be original CS gameplay with better graphics, and unfortunately, that's not at all what CS:Source ended up being. The idea was simple enough: utilize some (but not all) of CS:Source's assets, including sound, textures, and models, to create a modification that would replicate the gameplay of the original Half-Life 1 Counter-Strike mod. This would give the independent CSPromod developers control over gameplay, movement, and behavior, while also making use of CS:Source's updated graphics. It also seemed logical to take the opportunity to add some long-needed features while undertaking such a project.
Working without the source code of either the original Counter-Strike, or Counter-Strike: Source, proved to make the project much more challenging than the original team had ever anticipated, and certainly much more challenging than the community has ever perceived the project to be. Without the original code of either game, our developers had to essentially completely reverse engineer the original Counter-Strike from scratch; a task which proved to be challenging all of the time, and utterly maddening most of the time (imagine being in the shoes of a coder who's being asked to recreate the "duckhop," a gameplay aspect which was obviously orginally a bug, but has become a community-beloved feature over the years). Due to the challenging nature of the project, the development process had to be completely restarted twice within the project's first nine months, each time with a different head programmer. The project originally kicked off in the Spring of 2006, was restarted in the Fall of 2006 with a new head coder, and then was begun from scratch a third time in January of 2007 under the guise of Kevin "arQon" Blenkinsopp. The third time indeed proved to be the charm for CSPromod, as that codebase is the version that's been stuck with ever since. So, while many in the community have often claimed otherwise, the current version of CSPromod is current about 2.5 years old.
The game's initial Beta 1.0 release in October 2007 represented about nine months of work, and while it admittedly was not fully realized, it did show proof of concept and solid base structure. Sadly, some of the community seemed to turn against the mod, due to the incredibly high expectations that had been built up for the project over time. Considering the mod's lofty goals, and the development team's good intentions, the situation was certainly regrettable. The 2nd and 3rd public releases each showed great signs of improvement, but still lacked the overall polish that was expected (despite the game being completely free of charge). After releasing Beta versions 1.01-1.03 publicly, our development team elected to continue work on a more private basis, due to massive amounts community backlash, and lack of constructive criticism. Since July of 2008, we've kept grinding away, and kept as quiet as possible, intending to return to the public eye only when we have something exciting to share with the community.
Back in 2007, it became very obvious fairly quickly to the entirety of the CSPTeam that for the community, showing was much better than telling. Therefore, it is the hope of our developers that the CSPromod 1.04 Beta release will address many of the community's questions, skepticism, and criticism, and in doing so, prove CSPromod to have become what many in the community have always hoped it would be.
Mission Statement

The objective of CSPromod is to improve the graphical quality, feature set, and spectatorship of Counter-Strike, while preserving the title's beloved gameplay, and in doing so provide community with the assurance of unlimited gameplay longevity. We view CSPromod as a resource for the community, its professional teams, event organizers, and media. For a long time, all of these entities have voiced their opinions, desires, ideas, and goals about the future of professional Counter-Strike; and for just as long of a time, they have been limited by the constraints of the very same game which brought them all together in the first place. Therefore, we strive to present the most competitive, enthralling, visually satisfying - and most importantly - customizable version of Counter-Strike ever created. We view this project as the community's own to tweak, polish, and grow. We hope that the community views it in the same vein.
Objectives

To improve upon the visual quality of the original Counter-Strike without diluting or negatively altering its beloved gameplay.

To help revitalize the competitive Counter-Strike landscape by providing an exciting new platform for both online and offline events.

To improve the interface and tool set by which individuals and media entities are able to spectate and broadcast Counter-Strike.

To provide a platform that offers return on investment and marketability to prospective corporate sponsors, both endemic and non-endemic.

To maintain a constant dialogue with the community and ensure that everyone's interests are heard and considered.

To provide a medium by which everyone in the community can voice their opinions about, and actively participate in, the development of Counter-Strike.

Why the does Counter-Strike community still need CSPromod?

Counter-Strike 1.6 is declining in popularity, by every objective statistical account. It needs a graphical refresh (without gameplay alterations) to ensure its continued success and prosperity at the top of the competitive gaming world. This is not only because corporate entities need to be satisfied, but also because Counter-Strike needs to keep roping in a younger, newer, fresher player base in order to keep growing. The simple fact is that these kinds of players only buy games that are cutting-edge and pretty. So, the original reason for CSP ("we need 1.6 with better graphics") still very much applies.

Having our own code base allows for the ability to add exciting custom features to the game that would vastly expand spectatorship capabilities and streamline competition interfaces. For Counter-Strike to continue to grow in eSports, the game needs additional such custom features, designed to improve competition and spectatorship. Once we actually get through the Betas, we can focus on adding, well, whatever custom features the community wants.

Because this game is entirely custom-coded, CSPromod is the community's only real way to guarantee 100% gameplay consistency in the long run. This means that, regardless of how many new versions of Counter-Strike are released, and regardless of how many new engines come out, the community will never be held at Valve's mercy in regards to preserving our beloved gameplay. CSP's code is ours, and therefore the community's; provided that every new engine release includes an SDK, we'll be able to take our code and apply it to each new set of graphical assets. This means the ability to keep gameplay the same across as many version updates as Counter-Strikes goes through, and the ability to consistently fulfill the basic philosophy of this project: preserve gameplay, improve graphics.

Why has CSPromod taken so long?

Many people do not realize that CSPromod really isn't a mod at all. It's a total conversion, and only shares assets such as models and textures. Because we've never had any access to the CS 1.6 or CS:S source code, there's never been anything to actually, well, modify. We had no access to any of the CS 1.6 or CS:S weapon code, movement code, logic code - nothing; not even the basic structure of Counter-Strike itself (scoring system, team system, bomb plant/defuse system, etc.). We had to recreate the entire game from scratch code-wise. If you open up the HL2SDK, you'll see exactly what we started with. In fact, the only parts of CSPromod that aren't entirely, 100% custom-made are the assets (models, textures, and skins). As you all know, those will also be replaced with custom assets in the near future.
The fact that, code-wise, CSPromod isn't actually a mod, but rather a completely custom-built game, accounts largely for the massive amount of time it's taken so far. The current iteration of the project was restarted from scratch in the beginning of 2007 (unfortunately, all of our progress and effort in 2006 was wasted, as we went through three head programmers that year who all turned out to be unreliable and disappeared with our code base). So what you're looking at is 2.5 years of work done by a very small development team of three coders, a mapper, and a project manager, all working on a volunteer basis in their spare time.
Why is CSPromod worth the community's time?

We owe the community two apologies: the first, because we failed in terms of quality assurance to properly test the first version of CSPromod (Beta 1.0). For what it's worth, we had no idea that people would be crashing into walls all over the place when we released that version. It didn't show up in our closed testing because we only tested with 10 people at a time. We would never have released that version if we knew that such problems would happen. However, at the end of the day, it was our responsibility to make sure bugs like that didn't pop up, so we owe an apology to the community. We're sorry to everyone for wasting your time with that release.
The second apology is in regards to the hype surrounding the first release of CSPromod. While this certainly wasn't entirely our fault, as the community itself managed to snowball and raise excitement and expectations for the project to an almost-holy level, we certainly didn't make any efforts to curb those expectations. We simply went along with the momentum, and we should've been more direct about the fact that the project was still going to need a lot of time. We want to apologize to everyone for that as well.
Regardless of your past experiences with CSPromod, Beta 1.04 deserves your 10 minutes. Throughout almost two years of jokes, negativity, and flames, we've just kept working. And working. And working. That in and of itself deserves 10 minutes of your time; not to mention the fact that the game is actually pretty darn good, and fun to play. If those reasons aren't enough, consider this: CSPromod represents customizable Counter-Strike. This means if you play it, and want to change something, you can have a voice in that (via our website, its forum, and its polling feature). All we ask is that you play the game for 10 minutes, with the mindset that, if you don't like something, we can change it. It's worth your time, your renewed hope, and your renewed enthusiasm.

hard to go to something new when you've been playing a game for so long?

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That's dumb. Most people who love a specific game can't wait until a new version is out. I mean, look at all the Diablo III people.

After 5 years of general stagnancy (1999 - 2004), I was glad to see a "modernized" version of CS come out.

I know there was some backlash from gamers on how the "feel" of the game was changed from 1.6 to CS:S, but I think Valve has done a good job of addressing the most grievous of these issues and at the same time taking the game to a new level.

That's dumb. Most people who love a specific game can't wait until a new version is out. I mean, look at all the Diablo III people.

After 5 years of general stagnancy (1999 - 2004), I was glad to see a "modernized" version of CS come out.

I know there was some backlash from gamers on how the "feel" of the game was changed from 1.6 to CS:S, but I think Valve has done a good job of addressing the most grievous of these issues and at the same time taking the game to a new level.

you mean that piece of shit grindfest for hats and other inane garbage. no thanks. RIP pc gaming, hopefully valve releases another L4D game soon.

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Grindfest?

Hats and upgrades were only an afterthought. The core gameplay is still there, and it's still a hell of a lot of fun. On a good server filled with team players, it's much more strategic than games like MW2 could ever be.